GENDER-BLIND AND GENDER-BOUND: YOUNG ADULT COMICS AND THE POSTFEMINIST PROTAGONIST Seth Brodbeck A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2013 Committee: Becca Cragin, Advisor Jeffrey Brown Esther Clinton ii ABSTRACT Becca Cragin, Advisor Since 2005, publishers of children’s literature have begun to release a large number of graphic novels aimed at young readers. Many of these comics take place within the fantasy genre and feature female protagonists; a surprising trend given the normal assumption that boys do not want to read stories about girls, and the usual publishing strategy of courting male readers specifically. This project examines five such fantasy comics, Kazu Kibushi’s Amulet, Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl, Barry Deutsch’s Hereville, Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro’s Foiled, and Ursula Vernon’s Digger, which feature young heroines in their leading roles. Drawing on the scholarship of postfeminism (Gill, McRobbie, Tasker and Negra) and Perry Nodelman’s work on children's literature, I use textual analysis to reveal a set of problematic implications in the comics. Despite the positive framing of the protagonists as active participants in their narratives, these comics end up falling into familiar stereotypes and problems. Taken as a whole, they all promote a particular brand of tomboyish femininity in their protagonists, which becomes the de facto model of femininity to the reader given the general lack of other significant female characters. They furthermore have a tendency to avoid raising issues of gender, an elision which nevertheless coexists with casts of characters which are majority male, as well as settings which tend to distribute roles along traditional gender lines. The end result is a naturalization and personalization of structural inequalities in society. iii There is considerable potential in this combination of comics and children’s literature, both for the fostering of literacy among young readers, and for promoting cross-gender identification. From a feminist standpoint, however, that potential is squandered through an unwillingness to go further. Nevertheless, this is just one small section of a larger publishing trend which bears further investigation. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Becca Cragin, for helping me through the thesis-writing process and giving me the encouragement I needed to be confident in my work. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members, Jeffrey Brown and Esther Clinton, whose graduate seminars planted the seeds for the ideas contained in this project. Furthermore, I have nothing but gratitude and appreciation for our department secretary, Marsha Olivarez, whose assistance was indispensible in locating the aforementioned faculty members when I needed to talk things over in person, and who was always willing to let me into one of the unused rooms in Shatzel Hall when I needed a quiet place to work. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my good friend Tim Streasick, whose own trials and travails in the thesis process prepared me for what I was going to have to go through, and who served as a valuable sounding board throughout my own writing. Much love and appreciation goes to my dad, who encouraged my interest in comics and who still makes it a point to bring home graphic novels from the library for me to read. Finally, I'd like to thank Melissa Menerey, not only for her unflagging moral support and encouragement, but also for being my first line of defense against long and unwieldy sentences. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY.................................................................... 11 CHAPTER II. GENDER AND CHARACTERIZATION................................................... 28 CHAPTER III. GENDERED ASSUMPTIONS IN THE GAPS.......................................... 44 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................................... 53 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................. 57 1 INTRODUCTION There has been an explosion of comics released by the children’s publishing industry in recent years. Seen as a way to boost flagging literacy numbers by providing a bridge between picture books and adolescent novels,1 these comics have swelled the graphic novel sections of libraries. They were perhaps inspired by the success of Jeff Smith’s seminal Bone, a fantasy comic published by Scholastic to great critical and commercial success. While told from the perspective of the eponymous protagonist, Bone was more about the girl Thorn and her quest to restore her kingdom. Perhaps taking their cue from Thorn, several fantasy comic series starring active female characters have begun since Bone concluded and continue to release installments. These children’s comics have yet to garner much scholarly attention, either from feminist scholars for their female protagonists, or from scholars of the comics form or children’s literature genre. This project seeks to address that gap, and in the process I will address some critical questions: How do these comics reflect dominant cultural discourse on gender roles? Do these heroines serve to counteract stereotypes and express new subject positions for girls? And to what extent are they fully realized characters? What makes this sudden surge in heroine-driven children’s comics so remarkable is the way it flaunts the conventional wisdom of the children’s publishing industry. Publishers have long grappled with the tendency for girls to read in much larger numbers than boys. Owing to patriarchal assumptions about the universality of the male experience, this has traditionally resulted in a strategy of pushing boy protagonists in children’s literature. The assumption is that boys are unable or unwilling to relate to female protagonists, while both girls and boys can relate to male protagonists, so the industry has long courted boy readers through male heroes with the 1 See Gretchen Schwarz, “Expanding Literacies Through Graphic Novels,” The English Journal 95, no. 6 (2006): 58-64, and Michelle Gorman, Getting Graphic: Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy with Teens and Preteens, Linwood, 2004. 2 understanding that girls would continue reading regardless. Beyond simply predisposing the genre towards male heroes, this strategy has involved initializing the names of female authors, such as J.K. Rowling and K.A. Applegate, as well as hiding the occasional female protagonist behind abstract covers and androgynous names. Which is what makes the move to push female protagonists in comics so surprising: it is much more difficult to downplay the presence of a female protagonist in a visual medium than a verbal one, and these comics make no attempt to do so. Furthermore, comics itself is a medium generally associated with male readers, which makes the presence of so many heroines in these texts even more curious. Determining the reasoning behind this strategy is beyond the scope of this project, but its novelty nonetheless plays a role in marking these texts as worthy of attention. In order to maintain a manageable scope for this project, I limited myself to comics in the fantasy genre and published recently. All of these comics have been, and most are still being, published serially. I selected Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet, Barry Deutsch’s Hereville, and Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro’s Foiled based on the recommendations of librarians and teachers, and added Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl and Ursula Vernon’s Digger based on the critical acclaim those two texts have received. With the exception of Digger, which began in 2005 and concluded in 2011, all of these series have begun since 2008 and are still ongoing as of the writing of this thesis. Gauging the intended audience of these texts is difficult, owing to different standards between publishers and library associations, as well as the personal discretion of individual actors in deciding where to shelve and when to recommend them. From the publisher’s side, these texts are generally recommended for “middle grade,”2 or “middle-school,”3 readers, with recommended ages generally falling in the 8-12 range (sometimes referred to as the “tween” demographic). Digger is once again included as an exceptional example: It was published first 2 First Second, “The First Second Collection.” 3 Abrams, “Book Details: Hereville.” 3 online as a webcomic and then later by Sofawolf Press, a small publisher specializing in stories featuring anthropomorphic animals as characters. Neither Vernon nor Sofawolf offer any indication of the intended audience; however, in reviews it is frequently discussed in the context of other children’s comics, such as Bone, and a WorldCat search indicates that it is often shelved in the “teen,” “YA,” or “juvenile” graphic novel sections of public libraries. Based on this, I am confident that it resides within the field of children’s literature and fits within the scope of this project. My methodology consists primarily of textual analysis and close reading of both visual and verbal elements from the texts and looking at how the visual and verbal are related. Children’s literature and fantasy both have a marked tendency towards